Separation in distributive congruence lattices (Q2496136)

The paper is an important contribution to the long-standing general problem: characterize lattices isomorphic to congruence lattices of algebras of a given variety \(\mathcal V\). The author concentrates on finitely generated and congruence distributive varieties. Even under these restrictions the problem is very hard and there are only few varieties for which a satisfactory answer is known. No obvious conditions are known for an algebraic lattice to belong to \(\text{Con} \mathcal A\) for some \(\mathcal A\in \mathcal V\). It turns out that the congruence lattices of subalgebras of SI-members of \(\mathcal V\) play an important role. The author introduced the concept of a separable subset of an algebraic lattice which is fundamental for his investigations. For a finitely generated congruence distributive variety \(\mathcal V\), he gets a close connection between non-separable sets in congruence lattices of algebras of \(\mathcal V\) and the structure of SI-members of \(\mathcal V\). The general result is applied to several lattice varieties. The paper contains also five open problems.